I LOVE ARABS
April 25, 1986
I love Arabs. I really do. They are so much more honest than the Jews I so often meet, they are so much more normal. Consider two examples of Arabs I love.
The first is Knesset member Muhamad Miari of the pro-PLO Progressive List. Miari is the very epitome of all that the liberal, humanist, democratic, co-existentialist egalitarians of the Jewish faith boast of. A well-mannered, polite, intellectual (he is a graduate of the Hebrew University) citizen of Israel, he rose on October 15, 1985 in the Knesset of Israel to declare:
The State of Israel is not the state of the Jewish people but rather of the citizens who live there as citizens of the State of Israel. I said it, we say it and we will continue to struggle for this.
And yet another Israeli Arab, poet, intellectual, writer, Anton Shamas, publishes a column in the leftist, self-hating Kol Ka’Ir (a local Jerusalem weekly controlled by the newspaper Ha’Aretz) on September 13, 1985, and writes: “A Jewish state, by its very definition, carries with it the seed of disaster, namely the collapse of democracy.”
From Barbara Ginsberg, here.